Tag: Social Media

I’ve been increasingly disappointed with my experience on Facebook. I find that fewer and fewer of my friends are seeing what I post and engagement is increasingly going down.

I’m seeing more and more “sponsored” posts and advertising crowding out organic content, which probably plays a part in this…

I have danced with completely deleting my Facebook account for quite some time. There are a few reasons why I haven’t done so yet, but I view content there occasionally and post content there rarely. When I do post to Facebook its generally reposting from a blog post, or cross posting from my Instagram feed.

Again, Thomas Hawk nails it:

I feel respect for my content on Ello, which is shown large in full high res glory. This is why I put more of myself into my art and photography on Ello than any other site. The respect feels greater.

I am playing with ello too (find me at ello.co/desparoz and will certainly try out posting some images and words there to see what feedback I can get.

For me, for now, DesParoz.com remains my main venue to posting content (images and words), but some social media will continue to play part of communicating that – and will be an increasingly important part of the conversation that continues after the post. [1]

I have lots of questions about the future of Ello, but at this time Ello is seriously interesting.

While comments are currently still enabled on DesParoz.com, I prefer the conversation to happen elsewhere – such as on the commenters own site, linked back, or perhaps now on Ello. I like John Gruber’s approach of keeping the site clean, an approach that sites like Re/code are now following. ↩

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Social Media is an important way to interact with friends and colleagues, and in many cases, with colleagues, customers and suppliers. It can be a powerful tool, but it can also be an incredible productivity sinkhole.

It is also a fact that many of the major social media services have progressively and slowly evolved (eroded) their terms of service to decrease privacy.

Personally I minimise my time on social networks, sticking mainly to Twitter and LinkedIn. I use Google+ and Facebook selectively, and then only in dedicated (read: sandboxed) apps, or in a browser that I only use for these sites. I don’t access Google or Facebook from my main browser.

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Launched initially as a paid service, ADN has had a special feel about it as the signal-to-noise ratio is excellent, with spamming non-existent, and actual conversations between what seem to largely be real people. The value proposition was that being a paid service, we users were the customers, not the product.

In the press release today, ADN founder Dalton Caldwell (@dalton) was almost apologetic in his justification for introducing free accounts. More importantly, however, he overviewed the ways in which the free accounts will be limited. Apart from having to be invited by a (paid) member of ADN, there will be other restrictions…

Free tier accounts are similar to paid tier accounts, but with a few limitations. These limitations are as follows:

Worse yet, if I build an app that requires App.net, it still effectively requires a paid App.net account for my customers to use it, because the chances that they’ll already have been given a free-account invitation from another member are nearly zero.

A major problem with Twitter is that as a freemium service, we users are the product which Twitter sells to its advertisers. The signal-to-noise ratio is out of control, with a lot of spamming, and predominately broadcast based messages from various celebrities.

ADN offered us an alternative world, but it looks clear to me that this world has failed to get sufficient momentum. High profile users like Stephen Fry have dropped their accounts, and powerhouse users like John Gruber, John Siracusa and others have reduced their participation.

I suspect that ADN is confused about what their product actually is.

Is ADN a social media network? If so, where are the users?

Is ADN a storage platform? If so, what is the compelling proposition against Dropbox, Amazon S3 or CloudApp? And why would we pay for it in addition to the cost of the app?

I want ADN to survive and thrive. But as a founding user, I am not at clear anymore as to its value proposition. I hope that by going free, ADN isn’t starting down a path to a free-fall.

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Its strange that in 2011 there are still businesses operating with the belief that Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ and more) are fads, and that social media doesn’t have a direct business role to play.

Over the past few years, I’ve enjoyed Erik Qualman’sSocial Media Revolution slideshow that he has put together with stats from (and presumably to promote) his book SocialNomics. He has recently released version 3 of this presentation and its well worth watching, and taking note of.

I guess that the businesses that don’t get social media are destined to be part of (or follow) the 40% of Fortune 500 companies that won’t be here in 5 years.

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Our new Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has started tweeting (@JuliaGillard), following on from our ex-PM Kevin Rudd (@KevinRuddMP). Where Kevin07 seems to speak for himself, dropping anecdotes and one liners, Ms Gillard’s tweets are clearly from a staffer. Consider these examples (the last three as of this writing):

The first is clearly written on her behalf by someone – either that or she’s speaking about herself in the third person.

The other two are in quotes, indicating she is quoting someone. Considering that she doesn’t cite who she is quoting, I can only guess that she is quoting herself. Again, either someone is tweeting for her, or she is tweeting in the third person.

Social media, especially Twitter, is first person communication. It is one-to-many and simultaneous many-to-one communications, and it is marked by personal, direct and to-the-point messages.

I think her tweeting style is wrong, and it is going to show the tech community that she is not in touch.

I would make 2 suggestions for our PM.

Write your own tweets and do it in a personal manner; or

If you can’t do that, make sure your staffers make it look like you are personally tweeting

If you can’t do one or the other of these, I’d suggest renaming your account to something like “TheOfficeOfJuliaGillard”.

I don’t know whether someone gave her feedback along the lines of my comments above, or whether these directly got to her, but I do like that the most recent tweet is first person, and quite probably seems to be from her personally.